A quick recap of PyCon 2017

This year’s PyCon 2017 was the largest gathering of Python users
yet, and the talks were as high caliber as one would expect. Below I’ll
highlight some of my favorites by familiar and less familiar speakers that I
thought were particularly well done or presented a great argument.

Raymond Hettinger: “Modern Python Dictionaries: A confluence of a dozen great ideas”

Raymond is a Python core developer and definitely a crowd favorite. His talks
are often simple yet profound. This year, he gave a talk on updates to the
dictionary type in the latest versions of Python, which he proposed to
python-devnearly five years ago and have finally come to
fruition:

Łukasz Langa: “Unicode: what is the big deal?”

Łukasz is also a Python core developer, but is perhaps the only one who stands
to personally benefit from Python 3’s more sane handling of Unicode due to
special characters in his name. Łukasz documents the history of character
encodings, as well as his personal struggles with software which doesn’t
understand special characters, to make a strong argument in support of Unicode:

Joe Jevnik: “Title Available On Request: An Introduction to Lazy Evaluation”

Joe is a great speaker who really understands Python internals and is able to
translate that knowledge into great talks about it. In his 2017 PyCon talk, he
goes in depth about lazy evaluation in Python to reveal how and why Python uses
lazy evaluation, and how you can optimize lazy evaluation as well:

This panel discussion is not a talk per se, but is an interesting look back at
the early days of Python and PyCon. The panel consists of some of the attendees
of the very first PyCon in 1994 sharing their thoughts and memories of the
history of the Python community and thoughts about where it is today:

Kelsey Hightower: “Keynote”

Kelsey is a developer evangelist at Google who usually is evangelizing about
Kubernetes. He gave a great closing keynote which modified his tried-and-true
Kubernetes live-demo with some new features and after gracefully overcoming
some initial hiccups, he pulled it off:

Dr. Russel Keith-Magee: “Emoji Archeology 101”

This lightning talk originally written by Russel was instead presented by
someone else, but it still contained all of his wit and humor. Although it
doesn’t have much of anything to do with Python, it’s definitely worth a watch: